When renowned film director Péter Gárdos wrote the story, he intended it as a film script, but eventually he made it into a novel. “Fever at Dawn,” the love story of two Holocaust survivors―the author’s parents―has ever since sold in more than 20 territories.

Krasznahorkai’s apocalypse is an apocalypse without resolution, hence an apocalypse without end – without the literal 'catharsis' of the Christian tale of judgment and salvation. For the narrating Beast, we ourselves are the alien matter, whose removal would bring the earth itself no catharsis, only the stance of a theatre left barren and void.

Dutch writer-journalist Toine Heijmans was the guest of Café Amsterdam Festival in Budapest. Orsolya Réthelyi talked to the writer about his first novel, "On the Sea," that has been awarded the prestigious French prize, Prix Médicis étranger.

"It started as a routine summer night" - Smoke, cheap rum and a half-eaten pack of margarine. György Petri's infamous poem in a new translation by Owen Good, and a look back at the poet's life and influence.

My present self is horrified by Kádár, and if it was this self standing there now, he may not be happy to hear that Kádár was dead, but he would surely understand that an inglorious era was over. To be followed by other inglorious eras.